


just take it in

by quidhitch



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: M/M, kind of, lol, this is a shitty high school au im sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-28 03:59:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8431072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quidhitch/pseuds/quidhitch
Summary: i.When Lance agreed to stay after school to help set up decorations for the dance and eat pizza with the rest of ASB, ‘oh, I should re-park my car’ wasn’t really the first thought that popped into his head. Maybe it should’ve been, because Lance is chronically late and gets stuck with the shittiest space in the sketchiest corner of the lot every day, but he’s never been a very good planner. Sometimes that’s served him well - he made the 7 o’clock news when he was 9 and decided to scale a tree without considering how he planned to get down. The fire department was called. He got to wear their hats. His abuela still has the clipping.Keith Kogane getting tossed like a rag doll against the side of Lance’s truck - well, it’s a slightly less illustrious experience. For a second all Lance can do is watch Keith spit a mouthful of blood onto his brand new tires, give the boy who threw him a red-tinted smile, and rasp “is that all you’ve got?”





	

**i.**

When Lance agreed to stay after school to help set up decorations for the dance and eat pizza with the rest of ASB, ‘oh, I should re-park my car’ wasn’t really the first thought that popped into his head. Maybe it should’ve been, because Lance is chronically late and gets stuck with the shittiest space in the sketchiest corner of the lot every day, but he’s never been a very good planner. Sometimes that’s served him well - he made the 7 o’clock news when he was 9 and decided to scale a tree without considering how he planned to get down. The fire department was called. He got to wear their hats. His abuela still has the clipping.

Keith Kogane getting tossed like a rag doll against the side of Lance’s truck - well, it’s a slightly less illustrious experience.

For a second all Lance can do is watch Keith spit a mouthful of blood onto his brand new tires, give the boy who threw him a red-tinted smile, and rasp “is that all you’ve got?”

Hulk Hogan over there seems to be going in for round two, and while Lance is a little afraid of what’ll happen to his beautiful face should he intervene, Keith is about to get his ribs broken and his mama raised him to do the right thing.

“Guys, seriously,” he says, voice a little shrill as he breaks through the small crowd that’s gathered to witness two guys take Mr. Coran’s assignment on ancient Rome just a little too seriously. “I just got the paint redone on this car. And that asshole Rolo’s Toyota is, like, right there just begging to be desecrated. Come on.”

“Yo, Chad, I thought you said this was your car?” one of the hooded figures Lance can’t quite make out says to yet another hooded figure Lance can’t quite make out.

“Nah, man, I said it was Isaac’s car!”

“Hey, nobody fucking asked me if it was my car, I assumed-“

“Who gives a fuck? Let ‘em fight.”

“I don’t want to pay for McClain’s paint job!"

This useless argument goes on for another five minutes, and through it all Lance’s eyes are locked on Keith, who, well, could look a little more happy to see him considering he just rescued his emo ass. Lance doesn’t reach out to touch him while the other guys are around, he knows the kind of glint that would put in Keith’s eye, so he waits until the supporting cast of West Side Story gets bored of hearing themselves talk and finally relocates. Then, and only then, does he throw out an arm to keep Keith from following.

“What’s your problem?” Keith hisses, shoving Lance a little. Lance rolls his eyes.

“No, what’s your problem, Keith,” he responds bitterly, grabbing Keith’s chin and turning his face side to side to survey the damage. A couple cuts along his cheek and a black eye that’s going to look pretty damn ugly tomorrow. The buzz from Keith’s fight must’ve started to wear off because he lets the appraisal happen without interruption, though he continues to glare daggers at Lance like he’s the one who gave him the bruises in the first place.

Lance shakes his head, and heaves a sigh, and he can tell Keith knows exactly what’s coming because they’ve had this conversation too many times before.

“99th percentile-“

“Don’t start,” Keith grumbles.

“-a 5,000 dollar scholarship in _seventh grade_ for college-“

“Lance-“

“-and you’re the only one who didn’t throw up on mystery meat Monday last week,” he adds, a poor attempt at masking his jealousy, "you’re spending Friday night getting beat up in a parking lot when you’ve got…” Lance struggles to find the right words, the words clean of any personal resentment, “when you’ve got everything.”

Keith works his jaw and gives Lance a brief once-over. He looks beautiful, his sharp features seem to glow in the dim lighting of the parking lot, eyes clear and bright. The expression in his eyes is unreadable and he’s still a little twitchy from the fight. It’s probably why he lets the next words slip out instead of shoving them down like he always does. “Not everything.”

Lance flushes and purses his lips, “Keith…”

Keith looks away and tucks his hands in his back pockets, and Lance knows that’s all he’s getting out of him tonight. He’s come to earn that Keith has two modes: violently honest and dead silent. They seemed to have shifted gears.

“You bring your death trap tonight?” Keith shakes his head, and Lance is relieved a late night motorcycle ride is not on the agenda for today. “Good. Come on,” Lance sighs, fishing around for his keys, “I’ll drive you home.”

Keith opens his mouth to be stubborn and protest, but Lance takes a step closer to him and slaps his hand over Keith’s mouth.

“Shut up,” Lance says, though it might be redundant considering his hand placement.

And Keith does shut up, but instead of just stopping words come out of his dumb mouth he does this: takes Lance’s wrist, yanks him forward to close the distance between them, and presses an angry kiss to the seam of Lance’s mouth. All of Lance’s breath comes out through his nose as he reflexively cups the back of Keith’s neck, fingers curling in the hair at his nape. Stupid mullet.

For a kiss that leaves Lance breathless, it takes an inordinate amount of time for Keith to come  up for air. The second he does Lance presses a staying hand against his chest, not far enough so he’s out of the circle of Keiths arms, but far enough that higher brain functions return to him.

“Someone might see,” he mumbles, an ache seizing his chest as Keith’s grip on the back of his blazer begins to loosen. It’s almost painful to say it, to feel Keith starting to recede into himself once again, but Keith is a mess and Lance is a mess and they’re really not doing each other any favors by trying to combine that.

Keith hums against his mouth and it sends a shiver down Lance’s spine, “Right. Better stop then.”

And Lance thinks maybe Keith has mastered the art of pulling away from him in the slowest, most excruciating way possible - a way that leaves every opportunity for Lance to pull him back, a way that showcases exactly what he’s missing by letting said opportunities fly by.

Keith gives him a smirk as he ducks into the passenger seat of Lance’s truck and Lance tries to dispel the taste of blood and cigarette ash on the flat of his tongue.

**ii.**

Lance isn’t sure when all this stuff between him and Keith started. Maybe it was the day he transferred to his school, and Lance had greeted him in the office with a bright smile and a promise to take him on the presidential tour. Keith had worked his jaw, said “thanks, but no”, and walked to his first period class (in the wrong direction) with a stubbornness to his gait that Lance found himself inexplicably drawn to.

Or maybe it started when class ranks came out at midterm and for the first time in his life Lance was sixth instead of his designated fifth spot. He’ll never forget the feeling of trailing his finger up the top of the list to see which bastard knocked him down - only to read the name ‘Keith Kogane’ printed in a neat black font next to the number ‘1’. He’d made a mental note then to constantly pester that guy until he revealed his trade secrets.

Or maybe it was at the senior retreat during the last days of summer when he’d seen Keith for the first time in three months, felt something unspool at the bottom of his stomach, and just _known_. And then Keith had said, irritably flicking a bit of ash off the end of his cigarette, that the only reason he’d gone to the stupid thing was because he knew Lance would be there. And then Lance had grabbed a fistful of Keith’s poor-fitting black t-shirt and kissed him like he’d wanted it for a long time. Keith introduced tongue. Lance pushed his fingers beneath Keith’s shirt. There was a moment.

Yeah, that was probably it.

That was, at least,  the point that marked the start of many cliche practices such as: “study sessions” at Lance’s house when his parents weren’t home, wherein he and Keith would makeout on Lance’s bed until they could hear the garage door start to open, at which point Lance would frantically shove Keith out his bedroom window just as he heard the click of Mama Sanchez’s work shoes on the stairs. Other such practices included going to drive in movies and making fun of the bad effects, going for burgers and getting in stupid french fry debates every time, and sneaking into the drama closet between third and fourth period to cop a quick midday feel.

Lance didn’t realize that the sexiness and the excitement of their clandestine relationship had an expiration date, and he’d waited too long to tell Keith he wanted to go public, and Keith had taken it to mean Lance wasn’t interested in that kind of thing. So Keith dumped him, because, and Lance quotes the text with which he did it, “he didn’t want them getting their wires crossed.” What a romantic.

They still kiss every so often, Lance has stopped serial dating, and when he looks at Keith he feels an awful sort of twist in the center of his chest - but everything is probably fine. Next year, he’s gonna tear it up as the big man on campus at MIT, and Keith will be doing god knows what most likely in a shack in the desert, and everything will still probably be fine.

**iv.**

They made Keith join the football team his sophomore year on the pretense of “keeping a troubled kid on the field and off the streets”, but everyone knows it’s because Coach Coran saw him running drills in PE the first day of freshman year and saw the makings of a star quarterback.

Lance goes to the games because he’s ASB president and if he didn’t, that would set a bad example, but also because he loves the way Keith looks when he pulls off his helmet after a long game, shaking out his terrible hair, eyes scanning the stands for whatever club Lance happens to be sitting with that night. He offers him a small, secret smile, and something soft always unravels in Lance and he thinks ‘everyone here tonight is looking at him, but he’s looking at me.’

Lance waits for him in the hallway adjacent to the locker room, giving the few guys who exit that way high fives, cheesy bead necklaces, and a healthy dose of school spirit. Keith’s always the last guy to come out - he once told lance he was paranoid about starting to smell like the rest of the guys on the team, old leather and nasty B.O.

Keith rounds the corner eventually, hair tied back from his face, wearing a simple black shirt and his signature disgruntled expression. Lance immediately breaks into a smile.

“Good game tonight, superstar,” he says, turning off his phone and slipping it in his back pocket. There’s five texts about after parties sitting unopened in his inbox, but when Keith sees him his eyes brighten, and that just seems so much more important. Something in Lance’s stomach incites a riot.

“Thanks,” he says easily, walking to where Lance is leaning against the hallway wall. He drops his gym bag and offers that same secret smile, “you don’t think I cut it a little close?”

Lance laughs. “Twenty seconds before the buzzer? Nah, that's downright early for you.”

“Too bad Coach didn’t agree.”

“Chewed you out?”

"Like you wouldn’t believe,” Keith sighed, rubbing the back of his neck.

There’s a small silence that falls between them, and as the seconds tick by where a flush starts to make its way across Keith’s nose, like he doesn’t know what to do with his hands or where to look, the wider Lance’s smile grows.

“So,” Lance says casually, nudging Keith’s gym bag with the toe of his sneaker, “did they give it to you?”

Keith blinks. “Give what to me?”

Lance fixes him with a look, and slowly realization creeps onto Keith’s expression. “Lance,” he starts, somehow already sounding exasperated when Lance hasn’t even managed to say anything exasperating. A talent, to be sure.

“Let me see it.”

“No,” Keith says flatly.

Lance’s lower lip curls into a pout. “Why not?”

“Because it’s stupid and I find the concept annoying and offensive.”

“You’re the quarterback!”

“I like to stay fit,” Keith says primly, “and throw balls at other people’s heads.”

Lance rolls his eyes. “I can’t believe you’re making such a big deal out of this!” Another pause, another bout of puppy eyes, and Lance can see Keith’s resolve starting to slowly crumble. “Please?” he asks one more time, bumping their shoulders together and fixing him with the most adorable smile he can muster.

“Whatever,” Keith snaps, leaning over and picking his gym bag up from the floor, “but just so you know, institutionally, I do not support this.”

Lance straight out laughs when Keith pulls a letterman jacket from his ratty red duffle bag, the balled up way it’d been shoved into the corner clearly evidence of Keith’s embarrassment at being presented with it in the first place. He hands it over to Lance with that same disgruntled expression on his face, but Lance swears there’s a bit of fondness edged into it too.

Lance takes it from him with an inordinate amount of joy on his face, shrugging his too-long arms into the sleeves with glee. It fits just right on Lance, which tells him that it must fall a little long on Keith, and this observation only serves to further his enjoyment of the moment.

“You look ridiculous,” Keith says quietly, but his blush belies the words.

“How ridiculous?” Lance asks, leaning in until their foreheads bump together and Keith’s cheeks lift in a smile. Lance leans the rest of the way until their lips are pressed together, and they look like some sort of cliché like this, kissing up against the lockers in letterman jackets.

It doesn’t feel like that, though. It feels like everything, and when he slides his arm around Keith’s neck he swears the secrets of the universe are right there at his nape.

**v.**

Prom is an enormous affair - they rent a limo, Lance gets a tux, Hunk gets him a corsage, and his Mama cries and takes so many pictures that he wonders for a second if he’ll miss the whole thing posing on his porch.

Pidge, thank god, gets them down the driveway with some very fast talking and Lance spends the night feeling like king of the world. He dances with his friends and every pretty person he’s ever hit on, he’s named prom king, and he looks fantastic in all the pictures from the photo booth. If he looks around the room a few times for a brooding, inappropriately dressed dark mullet, well, it happens, but for the most part he spends the night dancing and laughing with his friends, wondering how life could possibly get any better.

It throws him a curveball on his way home when he pads up the stairs to his room, humming The Only Exception with much more zeal than anyone whose been dancing for four hours straight should, and Keith is sitting on his windowsill, legs tucked up against his chest, staring at the moon like some kind of angsty weirdo.

“Jesus christ,” Lance whisper yells, stumbling slightly and trying to stop his heartfrom going at a million miles a minute. He may be slightly under the influence. “Keith? Am I hallucinating?”

Keith looks toward him and frowns, “why would you be hallucinating? Did you do shrooms?”

“Wh- no! What kind of prom king do you take me for?”

A small, endearing smiles tips the corner of Keith’s mouth. “You got Prom King?”

“Duh,” Lance smiles back, pointing at the plastic crown on his head, “watch it, Kogane. You’re in the presence of royalty. I could have you beheaded for trespassing.”

There’s a beautiful, wry expression on Keith’s face that Lance wants to bottle up and take with him everywhere. “My sincerest apologies,” he slides off the windowsill in one fluid motion that very much appeals to Lance’s vaguely horny drunk self.

“Why didn’t you come tonight?” Lance asks hopelessly, because even as he closes his fingers around Keith’s fingers and pulls him forward imploringly, he already knows why.

Keith shrugs, letting go of Lance’s hands and curving an arm around his waist. He smells clean, like he does after he comes out of the showers after a game. Lance wants to tuck his head in his neck and stay there forever, so he does.

“I’m glad you had a good time,” Keith says against his temple.

“I’m glad you’re here right now,” Lance says back, pulling back so he can press a kiss on Keith’s forehead, nose, then mouth. The last one is soft and beautiful and lingers in a way that makes something tug at the back of Lance’s stomach. Keith’s arms around his waist suddenly feel a bit warmer, and Lance thinks about how this scene ends in every teen movie he’s ever watched.

“Hey,” he says softly, breaking the kiss and peering into Keith’s pretty bright eyes, “I know we haven’t really talked about it, but-“

Keith opens his mouth like he’s about to disagree, but Lance pushes on.

“-do you want to cuddle?”

Keith has to press his face into the face of Lance’s shoulder to keep from laughing out loud, and Lance tangles his fingers in the soft, recently washed strands at his neck. It felt like such a uniquely important moment.

Lance falls into Keith properly, and Keith sloppily deposits him on the tiny bed in the corner of the room, sliding in next to him with the proper hesitance of an awkward teenager on prom night. Lance, however, inhibition dulled by alcohol and general Lance-ness, does not hesitate to tangle their legs together and drape himself over Keith’s broad, hard frame like some sort of octopus.

“You have more leg than you know what to do with,” Keith grumbles, shifting around a bit as a hand settles low on Lance’s back. This bed really isn’t big enough for the both of them, but somehow they work. It’s straight out of those previously referenced teen movies, lke Sisterhood of the Traveling Bed Sheets or something.

“You love it,” Lance mumbles, and seconds later he’s asleep, lips just barely brushing the base of Keith’s neck with every breath.

The next morning the knock on Lance’s door has Keith practically flying out the window, and Lance struggling to explain where the emo black hoodie on the floor of his bedroom came from. It really doesn’t help that it smells like cigarette smoke, but when his Mama leaves the room, Lance presses it to his nose and smiles.

**vi.**

Someone wrangles Keith into a tie for graduation, and despite the fact Lance has been praised all night by various teachers and peers and given the most bomb ass speech in the history of high school, it’s still one of the highlights of the night.

He wears a wine-colored tie and dress jacket, a black shirt stretched across his chest beneath them. At some point in the evening he sheds the jacket, rolls his sleeves up to his elbow, and shakes out that awful hair of his, and it’s all Lance can do not to reach across to reach across the dinner table and kiss his stupid mouth.

Keith corners him before he heads home for the night, with his parents occupied with blubbering over Hunk and his teachers having handed out their parting words with tears in their eyes, he’s no longer in high demand. Lance sometimes like to think about whether or not Keith plans these things, lies in wait until the opportune dramatic moment to wreck him completely. It’s nice to believe that he does.

“God, who’s tie is that?” Lance asks, eyes raking appreciatively over Keith’s frame for the fortieth time that night.

“Shiro’s,” Keith’s responding smile is gorgeous. “It’s stupid, but he insisted. Do I look like a tool?”

“You always look like a tool,” Lance reminds, wetting his lips as Keith shrugs in acceptance. He comes to lean next to him against the gym wall, their shoulders pressing together in what should be an innocuous point of contact, but Lance still feels his heart beat rabbit-fast in his chest.

“I wanted to congratulate you,” Keith says finally, looking over at Lance with a soft expression on his face, “on getting into that college. It’s not like it’s a huge surprise, but. Still really great. I’m happy for you.”

Lance tries not to let it come through in his expression, but his heart sinks lower and lower with each word that pushes through Keith’s slightly chapped lips. He does not want, in this moment where they are pressed against each other and Keith looks irresistible in a black button down, to be reminded of the fact they are going to be hundreds of miles away from each other next year. That Keith is probably going to find a hot astronaut boyfriend at his internship and let Lance become a distant memory of that one guy he hooked up with sometimes in high school - what was his name again?

“Thanks,” Lance says, letting that series of increasingly dramatic thoughts die in his mind. “It means a lot from you.”

“Sure.”

There’s another pause, and Lance kind of feels like he’s going to cry so he’s about to excuse himself to go do it in the bathroom when Keith’s fingers trail down his forearm and lock between his own, their palms suddenly pressed together in a tight clasp.

“I’m gonna miss you, though,” Keith says, looking straight ahead and squeezing Lance’s fingers, and Lance really is going to cry now, he can feel it welling up in his throat and if he even opens his mouth he’s going to tell Keith he loves him so he keeps his lips firmly closed, and squeezes Keith’s hand back in response.

It’s not nearly enough, but if it’s all Lance can take he vows to remember every second.

**vii.**

College is hard. Lance is charismatic and loud and he goes to the Latinx student barbecue, so he’s got friends, albeit it the dreaded “orientation friends” but friends none the less, so he really should be complaining but… god, he misses his mom. And the familiarity of his bed dipping beneath him. His little sister screaming at him to stop hogging the bathroom in the morning. Knowing exactly what was expected of him academically, socially - he’s offered a line of cocaine and he thinks maybe morally, too - and it’s just going to take a few nights of shoving his head between his legs and trying to calm down before he gets into the swing of things.

This is one of those nights. His roommate is out, his friends ate dinner without him, and his mom isn’t answering the phone - it’s suddenly starting to hit him that in a few years, his home will not be his home. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do with the rest of his life. What if he’s not smart enough to be an astrophysics major? What if he gets cut? How the hell is he going to pay for grad school? Why is he stressed about grad school when he’s literally a freshman in orientation?!

The nonstop series of daunting questions running through his mind stops abruptly at the sound of a sharp knock on Lance’s dorm door, which is strange because his roommate would just shove in, and he hasn’t told any of his orientation friends where he lives.

“Uhhh… just a second,” Lance says, wiping pathetically at his eyes and hoping to god it’s not an RA who has heard his depressing monologue from two rooms away. Silence on the other side of the door. Only serves to further Lance’s confusion.

Once his eyes clear up a bit, he keeps a generic friend-making statement poised on the tip of his tongue and wrenches open the door- but the sight waiting for him on the other side makes him stop short.

It’s Keith. His dumb mullet is tied in a ponytail at the nape of his neck, there’s rain curling the hair at his temple and running down the bridge of his nose, and he’s wearing a beat up plaid shirt that Lance has seen on him a million times. His face is soft and questioning, like if Lance proceeded to ask him why he was there, neither of them would really get an answer.

So Lance doesn’t say anything - he launches himself into Keith’s arms, burying his face in Keith’s neck, breathing in the first familiar thing he’s been able to touch and hold and feel in weeks. He’s embarrassed as fuck, but he can’t help the tears that well in his eyes. He’s so glad it’s Keith, he’s never felt safer than when Keith Kogane’s arms were wrapped around him.

He feels them slowly curl around his shoulders, pull him tight and close, lips pressing soft against Lance’s jaw. “Hey,” he says, pulling back and pressing his forward against Lance’s.

Lance lets out a choked, half sob half laugh, “Hey,” he says back, brushing Keith’s slightly damp hair out of his eyes, “I’m glad you’re here.”

Keith looks down at Lance’s lips and says, in a voice that has Lance by his throat, “Couldn’t think of anywhere else to be.”


End file.
